Cursor Hit 1 Million Daily Users. What Are They Doing Right?

A code editor built by a startup with fewer than 100 employees just hit 1 million daily active users. Stripe uses it. Figma uses it. Over 50,000 businesses have adopted it. In a market where VS Code has owned the editor space for years and JetBrains has loyal enterprise customers, Cursor somehow carved out a massive niche in under two years. I've been trying to figure out what they're doing differently. Here's what I think is actually going on. They Didn't Build an Extension — They Built an Editor This is the decision that mattered most. When GitHub Copilot launched, it was a VS Code extension. When other AI coding tools showed up — Tabnine, Codeium, Sourcegraph Cody — they were all extensions too. They had to work within VS Code's extension API, which limits how deeply you can integrate with the editing experience. Cursor forked VS Code. They took the entire editor and modified it at the source level. This means they control the rendering pipeline, the file system interactions, the ta